When to Stay, When to Go

If you're reading this because you're considering a move abroad, or because you already have and you're still processing that decision. I spent a long time in the historical record before I felt clear about my own personal decision. What follows is a summary of that research. This is not a verdict on your situation but I hope it can provide a framework for thinking through it honestly.

The stories our culture tells about resisting tyranny tend to glorify staying. The ones who defied from within, who risked everything, who died rather than comply. Those stories are real and powerful. But they are not the whole story, and treating them as the standard by which everyone must measure themselves does a particular kind of damage to people trying to think clearly under pressure. History is equally full of people who left, who built networks in exile, who kept records and testified and returned when it was finally possible — and who are just as responsible for what survived as anyone who stayed. The question has never been which choice is braver. It has always been which choice is useful, and when.

When resistance still works

In the early stages of authoritarian drift, civic resistance can genuinely alter a nation's course. Institutions are strained but functional. Courts still operate. Journalists still publish. Elections still happen and their outcomes still matter. This is the stage at which organizing, documenting, teaching, and refusing to normalize cruelty has real effect, because the machine isn't fully assembled yet, and friction still slows it.

The failure mode of this stage is mistaking the persistence of institutions for their health. Weimar Germany's opposition made this error. Hitler was appointed through legal process, and many believed the existing system would contain him. It didn't, because the system had already been hollowed from within by the time that became obvious. Italy's opposition made the same mistake a decade earlier. Socialists, Catholics, and liberals remained divided long enough for Mussolini to fill the space they couldn't agree to hold together. The lesson isn't that early resistance is futile. It's that it requires an honest assessment of whether the institutions you're working through still have structural integrity, or whether you are performing resistance inside a framework that has already been captured.

Chile offers the more hopeful version: teachers, clergy, and artists who refused to surrender the truth after Pinochet's coup, who built underground documentation networks that became the evidentiary backbone of democratic restoration decades later. They stayed and it mattered. But they knew what they were doing and why, and they accepted the costs with open eyes.

When the machine has taken over

There is a second stage, harder to misread once you're in it, when the system itself has been consumed. Propaganda replaces journalism not as a competing voice but as the only permitted one. Law becomes a tool of punishment rather than protection. Violence becomes normalized, then invisible, then unremarkable. At this stage, resistance from within doesn't slow the machine. It feeds it. The state identifies and eliminates dissent efficiently, and staying to fight primarily makes you a target without making the situation better.

The White Rose students at the University of Munich distributed anti-Nazi leaflets in 1943 knowing exactly what would happen. They were executed within days. Their courage was real. Their impact on the regime was negligible. This is not an argument against their choice — it's an argument for being honest about what that choice cost and what it achieved, so that people facing analogous situations can think clearly rather than romantically. In Stalin's Soviet Union, citizens disappeared for owning the wrong book. In contemporary North Korea, entire generations have grown up without a concept of dissent because dissent was eliminated before they were born. These are not situations in which staying and fighting produces outcomes. They are situations in which survival is the resistance.

Leaving at this stage is not abandonment. It is a different allocation of what you have to offer. You cannot testify to what you did not survive to remember.

The work of the diaspora

Exile has always been misread as surrender, and this misreading serves the interests of the regimes people are fleeing. The truth is that diasporas have been among the most effective long-term forces for democratic restoration in modern history, precisely because they operate outside the reach of the state they're opposing.

Spanish exiles kept democratic culture alive through forty years of Franco's dictatorship and returned when it finally collapsed. Chilean exiles scattered across Europe ran the international pressure campaigns that eventually made Pinochet answerable in ways he hadn't anticipated. Iranian and Syrian diasporas continue to archive testimony that regimes are actively trying to erase. These are not people who gave up on their homelands. They are people who understood that some work can only be done from a position of safety, where truth can still be spoken without immediate consequence.

Leaving doesn't end your relationship to what you left. It changes what you're able to do about it.

How to use this

This is an attempt to give you a more honest set of questions than the ones social pressure usually forces on you. Not are you brave enough to stay — but what stage are you actually in, and what does effective action look like at this stage? Not are you abandoning your country — but what practical capacity do you have to make a meaningful difference, and what does priority require right now?

I read a great deal before I felt settled in my own thinking on this. The scholars and historians who study authoritarian transitions for a living do not romanticize staying. They study outcomes. And what the record consistently shows is that the people who survived to tell the truth, to teach the next generation, to return and rebuild, made different choices at different moments, and almost none of those choices looked heroic from the inside while they were making them. They looked like trying to think clearly under circumstances that made clear thinking very hard.

Loud cultural voices are not a serious argument that holds up under the wisdom of our vast and diverse wise heroes. They are a cultural reflex. And cultural reflexes are not a wise measurement for anyone's future.

Sources and further reading

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.

Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Knopf, 2004.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.

Hochschild, Adam. Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Stern, Steve J. Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "The White Rose." Holocaust Encyclopedia. ushmm.org.

International Center for Transitional Justice. "The Role of Diaspora Communities in Transitional Justice Processes." ictj.org.